Month: January 2015

Just this weekend I attended and partially organized a lighting oriented Open Illuminati Hackathon in Otaniemi. ELL-i open source cooperative with Helvar, Fidelix and Ledil held an event for 48 hours of hacking. In addition to being part of organizing, I took part personally and joined Gaja, Ivan and Otso in a very ambitious effort at home automation and human centric lighting.

Ivan and Otso are already part of ELL-i open source cooperative, with Gaja being knowledgeable of us beforehand having attended the Bare Metal Hackathon in may 2014. We had premeditated slightly on irc about having a team and that we have some ideas on what kind of automated routines home lighting could have to make better life quality.

Our ambitions are centered on SAD therapy using ultrabright light and sleep rhythm sensing to facilitate easy mornings. We leveraged on existing ELL-i technologies, developed them further and created plans to extend our architecture towards storing the configuration in cloud, connecting to cloud calendars and reading weather service data.

I had great fun even though hacking was constantly interrupted with me also being responsible for opening the door. Anyhow, hacking was good and our team achieved great results. I mostly ideated, complained to people and waved my hands a lot. I also used my nonexisting illustrative skills to annoy twitter and the rest of us. Ivan procured from nowhere support for HelvarNet connection to DALi Router, Otso did cloud coding and Gaja worked on state machines. I’ll link to the project Github repository so you can see the top level materials.

Some other teams used ELL-i Site Controller to control an ELL-i Leaf Node RGB light so that they could concentrate more on the front end and algorithms. Asif and Omer did base their sun emulating on standalone ELL-i Leaf Node RGB light.

All in all I had great fun and started something I’ve always wanted to have. This project will continue to be developed as eventually I will install these systems in my home and I think the rest of the team wants the results for their personal use as well.

Oh and it will naturally be released as Open Source and Open Hardware, so everybody can benefit.